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Jasmine Eddy dreaded the month she would turn 19, knowing that when it came she would be cast into the adult world to fend entirely for herself.

Most young adults ease slowly from home to independence, relying on their parents for accommodation, help with applications for jobs and post-secondary programs, and, very often, financial support,

As a foster child, all of Eddy’s supports were set to vanish overnight.

“You’re on your own for the first time,” said Eddy, who spent most of her childhood in foster care. “You worry if you will have a home and if you will be able to support yourself.”

There is nothing gradual about “aging-out,” as it is called in the language of child welfare services.

At the end of the month that a foster child turns 19 all government support ends.

So even for a survivor like Eddy, who as a young child shuffled between her grandparents and mother’s house and was once beaten in a foster home, the impending deadline was daunting.

Eddy was in and out of foster care from the time she was very young — the first foster home she remembers was when she was three years old.

After that, she went back and forth between her grandparents’ home and her mother’s. She did have a stable, caring foster home from the age of nine to 19, but as she approached her 19th birthday, Eddy knew she had to learn how to take care of herself.

“So much is riding on finding a place on the last month of your birthday. It is a lot of stress for one person unless they have the help,” said Eddy, now 20.

“You wonder if you will have enough money, if you can find a place, if it will be long term, if you will have a job, if it will all work out. If you have help, it brings (the stress) down ... but you can still be left worried.”

If government care was extended to the age of 21, Eddy said it would definitely have helped her.

“It makes it more stable. You have more support. When you’re on your own you have to figure out things on your own,” Eddy said.

Three months before she turned 19, Eddy moved out of her foster home and into a semi-independent living suite at Aunt Leah’s Place, a not-for-profit organization that prepares foster youth for independence.

Although she had to move out when her funding ended on her 19th birthday, she has returned many times for more support in Aunt Leah’s job and lifeskill training for youth over 19.

Over the years in her foster home, Eddy developed a strong bond with 11 other foster kids she calls her siblings who lived in the home at some point. At any given time, there were about four or five foster children, Eddy said, and one of them was a three-year-old boy who had already lived in eight homes before moving into Eddy’s house.

“I have a great bond with him — he’s my little brother,” Eddy said. “When you’re in the foster care system, you meet so many people. And then you watch them walk out of your life.”

She says her bond with those other young people is what makes her want to become a child and youth care counsellor so that she can help other kids who are living through experiences like hers.

“Kids who have a rough life need someone to talk to,” Eddy said, adding that she has kept in touch with her “siblings” so that they will go through life knowing they have someone.

“Definitely having a counsellor and having it paid for would help kids in care. Most kids in care don’t have one, and you have to fight for it. They have so much trauma being taken from their families or being left by their families.

“I had to fight to get a counsellor when I was in high school. I had depression and I ended up being severely depressed before I got the counsellor — it shouldn’t get that far.”

She said she was assigned to eight or nine different social workers in her time in care, and each time the social worker changed, it was like starting over.

“You get a social worker, but then after a while you get a new one. Any progress you made with the first social worker is now gone, and you have to start all the way back at zero,” Eddy said. “I could work my way up with one social worker to spend a weekend visiting with my mom, and then I would get a new social worker and have to go back to an hour or two a day.”

Today, 18 months after her 19th birthday, Eddy is living with a friend and her friend’s mom and taking a psychology course at Kwantlen University in Surrey that she paid for herself with money she made at her job at Wholesale Sports.

It is going to be a long road to complete the four-year Child and Youth Care Counsellor degree, without any financial support from parents, but Eddy is determined.

Pamela Costello, a support program coordinator at Aunt Leah’s Place, helped Eddy find many different scholarship applications to apply for. She was like a “nagging parent,” Eddy said.

Although she was approved for a couple of scholarships, she had to turn them down because she wasn’t accepted into the Child and Youth Care Counsellor program she wants to attend at Douglas College on her first try.

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